Elon Musk links smartphones to the total ‘collapse’ of society – Metro.co.uk

Elon Musk has published a chilling meme which connects smartphones to the collapse of human society.

The billionaire memelord published an image which recalled the optimism of 2009, when people bought a smartphone and thought: It can do anything.

The next image then features the words: 2019. Stare into this nightmare rectangle and watch society collapse in real-time.

Elon captioned his tweet with the word phoney.

You might think that a man who used cutting edge tech to get stonking rich would be excited about the bright future awaiting us.

But Elon is definitely not a bright-eyed techno-optimist.

The billionaire is an outspoken doom-monger who fears super-smart computers are destined to conquer the Earth and annihilate humanity.

He recently issued a warning about the dangers of denying the threat that super-intelligence poses to our species.

On Twitter, Musk responded to a tweet from the writer Robert McFarlane, who quoted a New York Times article and wrote: I wonder if the essence of climate denial among disbelieving Americansis an unwillingness to accept there is anything in this world so powerful it could overrule them.

Musk then replied: Same goes for digital superintelligence denial.

The subtext of this tweet suggests the rise of the machines is a threat comparable to the dangers of climate change.

Elons fears are shared by many experts most notably the late Stephen Hawking yet is quite out of step with some of the billionaire techno-optimists of Silicon Valley.

MORE: The probability of human extinction is frighteningly high, scientists calculate

In 2018, was claimed that Google founder Larry Pagedismissed Elons fears as speciesist during an argument at a Napa Valley party in 2015.

A top professor at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) alleged the two tech moguls clashed in a long and spirited debate in the early hours of the morning.

In his book Life 3.0: Being Human In The Age of Artificial Intelligence,Max Tegmark wrote: [Pages] main concerns were that AI paranoia would delay the digital utopia and/or cause a military takeover of AI that would fall foul of Googles dont be evil slogan.

Elon kept pushing back and asked Larry to clarify details of his arguments, such as why he was so confident that digital life wouldnt destroy everything we care about.

At times, Larry accused Elon of being speciesist: treating certain life forms as inferior just because they were silicon-based rather than carbon-based.

Tegmark and Page were talking about a childrens book called The Day My Butt Went Psycho at the party before the two billionaires locked horns after cocktails.

The MIT professor said Page is a passionate supporter of digital utopianism, which holds that robots and AI are not a threat to the future of our species.

Larry [said] that digital life is the natural and desirable next step in the cosmic evolution and that if we let digital minds be free rather than try to stop or enslave them the outcome is almost certain to be good, he continued.

He argued that if life is ever going to spread throughout our galaxy, which he thought it should, then it would need to do so in digital form.

Elon Musk isnt alone in his fears about the development of artificial intelligence.

Also in 2018, Professor Stephen Hawking said AI is likely to replace humans altogether and become a new form of life that will outperform our fleshy, flabby species.

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Elon Musk links smartphones to the total 'collapse' of society - Metro.co.uk